In Toronto, the only thing more frustrating than driving during the work week is driving on the weekend. Saturday and Sunday are the days city planners and bureaucrats let their freak flags fly. The weekend offers them a chance to wreak orange-hued havoc on city streets, roads and highways all in the name of “improving infrastructure.”
The rationale goes like this: “Most people aren’t working on the weekend and are just trying to relax and have a good time, let’s ruin that.”
I imagine meetings at the City of Toronto go something like this: “The Blue Jays have a night game on Saturday and a day game on Sunday. Toronto FC is playing on Saturday. Drake is at the Scotiabank Arena Saturday and Sunday. We’ve got a triathlon on Saturday morning and the quadrathlon on Sunday, so let’s reduce Highway 401 by three lanes and shut down the Don Valley Parkway all weekend so they can repaint the lines.”
It’s pretty much the same thing in every major Canadian city. The weekend is not sacred. It is something to be ruined in the name of civic improvement. Saturdays and Sundays are days in which normal awful traffic is changed into extraordinarily horrible and dismaying traffic.
I don’t mean to disparage Canadian identity at a time when we are under threat of becoming the 51st State, but there is something that feels distinctly Canadian about perceiving days of rest and relaxation as some kind of contagion that needs to be stopped at all costs. Yes, other countries ruin the weekend with road closures, but I don’t get the sense they don’t do it with the same zeal and gleeful wild frenzy that we do.
Why should I be made to feel like I have made a grievous and irredeemable mistake simply for going away for the weekend or driving to see a play? That was the case a few weeks ago when we drove to the Stratford Festival to see Christopher Hampton’s 1985 adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The production was exceptional and it was deeply disappointing to note that not a single Canadian critic who reviewed it mentioned that the play’s portrayal of wicked aristocrats using people as commodities and conquests was an attack on the free-market values and individualism of 1980s Thatcherism. That’s what I wanted to discuss as we drove back to Toronto.
What I did not want to discuss was the fact that it would take three hours to drive 161 kilometres home. The traffic congestion was unrelenting. Lanes closed here and lanes closed there. A cornucopia of orange cones. I did not want to discuss the fact that our drive would be so long and tedious that it would feel like a challenge that wicked widow Marquise de Merteuil issues to dissipated libertine Vicomte de Valmont.
“Vicomte, I want you to drive the virtuous, deeply religious Madame de Tourvel back from the Stratford Festival on Sunday afternoon.”
“You would be so cruel?”
“When one woman strikes at the heart of another she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal … Take the 401.”
At the risk of being a killjoy, is it really necessary to close streets for the various charity events and other races that are scheduled every weekend when the weather is not too hot or cold for outdoor activity? Is the running and leaping really required? Couldn’t they just raise the money? When someone asks me, “Would you like to donate to Michael Garron Hospital?” I don’t reply, “Will there be any long-distance running?”
In A Christmas Carol, the gentleman asks Scrooge, “What shall I put you down for?” He does not say, “At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge, I was wondering if you’d sponsor me for the “25K Fox Hunt to Fight Poverty.”
Besides, it’s not the events or fund-raising I object to, they are wonderful, it’s the timing and traffic trouble they cause.
I have a solution. For starters, leave the weekend alone. Stop messing with it.
Schedule everything – the construction, the marathons, charity bike rides, the festivals – during the middle of the week when nobody wants to go to work. We’ve already established during COVID that it’s unnecessary.
Why not shut down all lanes of the DVP on a Tuesday and Wednesday, so that all the workers they are forcing back to the office can stay home? Schedule charity runs for Thursdays and make companies give those who participate the day off with pay. We don’t get that many weekends in our brief time on earth.
Loverboy put it best, “Everybody’s working for the weekend.”
Stop wrecking them with construction and street closures.